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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 821.912
EAN num: 9780393974997
ISBN number: 0393974995
Label: W. W. Norton
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 224
Printing Date: 2000-12
Publishing house: W. W. Norton
Sale Popularity Level: 13674
Studio: W. W. Norton
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
The text of Eliot's 1922 masterpiece is accompanied by thorough explanatory annotations as well as by Eliot's own knotty notes, some of which require annotation themselves. For ease of reading, this Norton Critical Edition presents The Waste Landas it very first appeared in the American edition (Boni & Liveright), with Eliot's notes at the end. Contexts provides readers with invaluable materials on The Waste Land's sources, composition, and publication history. Criticism traces the poem's reception with twenty-five reviews and essays, from very first reactions through the end of the twentieth century. Included are reviews published in the Times Literary Supplement, along with selections by Virginia Woolf, Gilbert Seldes, Edmund Wilson, Elinor Wylie, Conrad Aiken, Charles Powell, Gorham Munson, Malcolm Cowley, Ralph Ellison, John Crowe Ransom, I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, Delmore Schwartz, Denis Donoghue, Robert Langbaum, Marianne Thormählen, A. D. Moody, Ronald Bush, Maud Ellman, Christine Froula, and Tim Armstrong. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included.
About the Series: No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehenive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Careful editing, first-rate translation, and thorough explanatory annotations allow each text to meet the highest literary standards while remaining accessible to students. Each edition is printed on acid-free paper and every text in the series remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice for excellence in scholarship for students at more than 2,000 universities worldwide.
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Rated by buyers 
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I am not going to review the famous poem. Such a review, from an Amazon customer, would be unnecessary and preposterous. (It astonishes me so few of my fellow reviewers have realized this). This is a review of the selection of texts this Norton Critical Edition has annexed to the poem.
The editor of this book has (a little lazily, perhaps) simply concertinaed Eliot's sources and a sampling of critical essays into 280 pages. The reader receives little to no editorial guidance from Michael North. But the approach is simple and it works. If you are determined to understand Eliot's poem, then all the pieces of the exegetical puzzle are here, in one convenient volume, to be pieced together. That piecing together, let me emphasize, is not done for you. But then, I wonder if any other approach to Eliot's poem is possible.
I have given the book four stars instead of five for the inclusion and the placement of the rather long-winded essays on the publication history. What passages, words, punctuation marks Pound chose to excise (de-exise and re-excise) and when, and where, and even in what colour pencil does little (I did not say nothing) to enrich our understanding of the poem. There should have been less of this, and it should not have preceded the more illuminating and explanatory critical reviews. The result is that the reader is overwhelmed with the minutiae of Pound's twiddling and tuning before everything has been done to help the reader understand the already sufficiently knotty FINISHED poem.
In conclusion, I found this book to be imperfect, but helpful.
Rated by buyers -
Recently in this space I reviewed Allen Ginsberg's modern 'beat' classic Howl. I have in the past written admiringly of the metaphysical poet John Donne and of my hero revolutionary Cromwellian Commonwealth political activist/poet John Milton of Paradise Lost fame. All poets in their ways different but held together by one common bond-the ability to sense the beauty hidden in the English language and to put it in symbolic form. Eliot is in that company. To a great extent, at least in the modern era, T.S. Eliot's little poem is the one that permits all following poets including Ginsberg to explore and explode the possibilities of the language. No bad for a bank clerk, right?
I remember very first reading, halteringly, Wasteland in high school straight up without notes. We spent a lot of time on the arcane references Eliot sprinkled throughout the poem and we collectively had a project to dig out all the unfamilar symbols buried in the lines of the poem. That, my friends, was serious work. In fact one classmate argued that the Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail was child's paly by comparison. We definitely could have used the copious notes provided here to speak nothing of the various critical interpretations presented. Well done. With the availability of this reference work do not, I repeat, do not fly solo with the Wasteland. It is too important a poem of the modern age to lose its meaning for lack of knowledge of some arcane references.
Rated by buyers 
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I'm not really qualified to review TS Eliot. First of all, I couldn't be impartial---I made a special trip while in Somerset to visit the man's grave (actually a little plaque). Secondly, the corpus of his work represents one of the greatest pinnacles of the English language. I'll let Oxford dons review Waste Land.
This book of essays, however, was extremely helpful to me as I studied this poem, this monument to our decaying culture. I really think that it was instrumental in allowing me to reach a certain level of understanding, a level of comfort, with one of the most dense poems in English. However, it's not cheap, and no easy read in itself. You have to want it!
If you are serious about your Eliot, pull out the VISA and go to town. If you are just passing through, your local library has a copy you could check out before spending the money.
Rated by buyers -
Norton Critcal did it right with this edition. With enough essays and criticism to help anyone get a deeper understanding of Elliot's poem, this edition is a must have. Rainey's essay on the publishing of the poem is particulary interesting.
Rated by buyers -
I read The Waste Land and find that most poetry that comes after it is self-indulgent, limpid nonsense. The Beats? Who are they? Rubbish, all of it. Philip Larkin? Wimpish nonsense. But TSE and Ezra Pound, there you have the meaning and message of modern poetry. Since them and then, poetry has gone downhill into the personal, the confessional, the onanistic. Poetry MUST be difficult, not accessible, not transparent and easily understood after one reading.
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